When the Persians had retreated from Europe after being conquered both by
sea and land by the Greeks, and those of them had been destroyed who had
fled with their ships to Mycale, Leotychides, king of the Lacedæmonians,
returned home with the allies that were from the Peloponnesus, as we have
already noted; while the Athenians, and the allies from Ionia and the
Hellespont, who had now revolted from the king, stayed behind, and laid
siege to Sestus, of which the Medes were in possession. Having spent the
winter before it, they took it, after the barbarians had evacuated it;
and then sailed away from the Hellespont, each to his own city. And the
people of Athens, when they found the barbarians had departed from their
country, proceeded immediately to carry over their children and wives,
and the remnant of their furniture, from where they had put them out of
the way; and were preparing to rebuild their city and their walls. For
short spaces of the enclosure were standing, and, though the majority
of the houses had fallen, a few remained in which the grandees of the
Persians had themselves taken up their quarters.
ATHENS REBUILDS HER WALLS
[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]
The Lacedæmonians, perceiving what they were about to do, sent an embassy
to them; partly because they themselves would have been more pleased to
see neither them nor any one else in possession of a wall; but still more
because the allies instigated them, and were afraid of their numerous
fleet, which before they had not had, and of the bravery they had shown
in the Persian War. And they begged them not to build their walls, but
rather to join them in throwing down those of the cities out of the
Peloponnesus; not betraying their real wishes, and their suspicious
feelings towards the Athenians; but representing that the barbarian, if
he should again come against them, would not then be able to make his
advances from any stronghold, as in the present instance he had done
from Thebes; and the Peloponnesus, they said, was sufficient for all,
as a place to retreat into and sally forth from. When the Lacedæmonians
had thus spoken, the Athenians, by the advice of Themistocles, answered
that they would send ambassadors to them concerning what they spoke of;
and they immediately dismissed them. And Themistocles advised them to
send himself as quickly as possible to Lacedæmon, and having chosen
other ambassadors besides himself, not to despatch them immediately,
but to wait till such time as they should have raised their wall to the
height most absolutely necessary for fighting from; and that the whole
population in the city, men, women, and children, should build it,
sparing neither private nor public edifice, from which any assistance
towards the work would be gained, but throwing down everything. After
giving these instructions, and suggesting that he would himself manage
all other matters there, he took his departure. On his arrival at
Lacedæmon he did not apply to the authorities, but kept putting off and
making excuses. And whenever any of those who were in office asked him
why he did not come before the assembly, he said that he was waiting for
his colleagues; that owing to some engagement they had been left behind;
he expected, however, that they would shortly come, and wondered that
they were not already there.
When they heard this, they believed Themistocles through their friendship
for him; but when every one else came and distinctly informed them that
the walls were building, and already advancing to some height, they did
not know how to discredit it. When he found this, he told them not to be
led away by tales, but rather to send men of their own body who were of
good character, and would bring back a credible report after inspection.
They despatched them therefore; and Themistocles secretly sent directions
about them to the Athenians, to detain them, with as little appearance
of it as possible, and not to let them go until they themselves had
returned back; (for by this time his colleagues, Abronychus, the son of
Lysicles, and Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, had also come to him
with the news that the wall was sufficiently advanced) for he was afraid
that the Lacedæmonians, when they heard the truth, might not then let
them go. So the Athenians detained the ambassadors, as was told them;
and Themistocles, having come to an audience of the Lacedæmonians, then
indeed told them plainly that their city was already walled, so as to be
capable of defending its inhabitants; and if the Lacedæmonians or the
allies wished to send any embassy to them, they should in future go as
to men who could discern what were their own and the general interests.
For when they thought it better to abandon their city and to go on board
their ships, they said that they had made up their minds, and had the
courage to do it, without consulting them; and again, on whatever matters
they had deliberated with them, they had shown themselves inferior to
none in judgment. And so at the present time, likewise, they thought it
was better that their city should have a wall, and that it would be more
expedient for their citizens in particular, as well as for the allies in
general; for it was not possible for any one without equal resources to
give any equal or fair advice for the common good. Either all therefore,
he said, should join the confederacy without walls, or they should
consider that the present case also was as it ought to be.
The Lacedæmonians, on hearing this, did not let their anger appear to the
Athenians; for they had not sent their embassy to obstruct their designs,
but to offer counsel, they said, to their state; and besides, they were
at that time on very friendly terms with them owing to their zeal against
the Mede; in secret, however, they were annoyed at failing in their wish.
So the ambassadors of each state returned home without any complaint
being made.
In this way, Thucydides continues, the Athenians walled their city in
a short time. And the building shows even now that it was executed in
haste; for the foundations are laid with stones of all kinds, and in
some places not wrought together, but as the several parties at any
time brought them to the spot: and many columns from tombs, and wrought
stones, were worked up in them.[b]
THE NEW ATHENS
The first indispensable step, in the renovation of Athens after her
temporary extinction, was now happily accomplished: the city was made
secure against external enemies. But Themistocles, to whom the Athenians
owed the late successful stratagem, and whose influence must have been
much strengthened by its success, had conceived plans of a wider and
more ambitious range. He had been the original adviser of the great
maritime start taken by his countrymen, as well as of the powerful naval
force which they had created during the last few years, and which had
so recently proved their salvation. He saw in that force both the only
chance of salvation for the future, in case the Persians should renew
their attack by sea,--a contingency at that time seemingly probable,--and
boundless prospects of future ascendency over the Grecian coasts and
islands: it was the great engine of defence, of offence, and of ambition.
To continue this movement required much less foresight and genius than
to begin it, and Themistocles, the moment that the walls of the city had
been finished, brought back the attention of his countrymen to those
wooden walls which had served them as a refuge against the Persian
monarch. He prevailed upon them to provide harbour-room at once safe and
adequate, by the enlargement and fortification of the Piræus. This again
was only the prosecution of an enterprise previously begun: for he had
already, while in office two or three years before, made his countrymen
sensible that the open roadstead of Phalerum was thoroughly insecure, and
had prevailed upon them to improve and employ in part the more spacious
harbours of Piræus and Munychia--three natural basins, all capable of
being closed and defended. Something had then been done towards the
enlargement of this port, though it had probably been subsequently ruined
by the Persian invaders: but Themistocles now resumed the scheme on a
scale far grander than he could then have ventured to propose--a scale
which demonstrates the vast auguries present to his mind respecting the
destinies of Athens.
Piræus and Munychia, in his new plan, constituted a fortified space as
large as the enlarged Athens, and with a wall far more elaborate and
unassailable. The wall which surrounded them, sixty stadia in circuit
[about seven and a half miles], was intended by him to be so stupendous,
both in height and thickness, as to render assault hopeless, and to
enable the whole military population to act on shipboard, leaving only
old men and boys as a garrison. We may judge how vast his project was,
when we learn that the wall, though in practice always found sufficient,
was only carried up to half the height which he had contemplated. In
respect to thickness, however, his ideas were exactly followed: two carts
meeting one another brought stones which were laid together right and
left on the outer side of each, and thus formed two primary parallel
walls, between which the interior space--of course, at least as broad
as the joint breadth of the two carts--was filled up, “not with rubble,
in the usual manner of the Greeks, but constructed, throughout the
whole thickness, of squared stones, cramped together with metal.” The
result was a solid wall, probably not less than fourteen or fifteen feet
thick, since it was intended to carry so very unusual a height. In the
exhortations whereby he animated the people to this fatiguing and costly
work, he laboured to impress upon them that Piræus was of more value to
them than Athens itself, and that it afforded a shelter into which, if
their territory should be again overwhelmed by a superior land-force,
they might securely retire, with full liberty of that maritime action in
which they were a match for all the world. We may even suspect that if
Themistocles could have followed his own feelings, he would have altered
the site of the city from Athens to Piræus: the attachment of the people
to their ancient and holy rock doubtless prevented any such proposition.
Nor did he at that time, probably, contemplate the possibility of those
long walls which in a few years afterwards consolidated the two cities
into one.
Forty-five years afterwards, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War,
we shall hear from Pericles, who espoused and carried out the large ideas
of Themistocles, this same language about the capacity of Athens to
sustain a great power exclusively or chiefly upon maritime action. But
the Athenian empire was then an established reality, whereas in the time
of Themistocles it was yet a dream, and his bold predictions, surpassed
as they were by the future reality, mark that extraordinary power of
practical divination which Thucydides so emphatically extols in him. And
it proves the exuberant hope which had now passed into the temper of the
Athenian people, when we find them, on the faith of these predictions,
undertaking a new enterprise of so much toil and expense; and that too
when just returned from exile into a desolated country, at a moment of
private distress and public impoverishment. However, Piræus served other
purposes besides its direct use as a dockyard for military marine: its
secure fortifications and the protection of the Athenian navy, were
well calculated to call back those metics, or resident foreigners, who
had been driven away by the invasion of Xerxes, and who might feel
themselves insecure in returning, unless some new and conspicuous means
of protection were exhibited.
To invite them back, and to attract new residents of a similar
description, Themistocles proposed to exempt them from the _metoikion_,
or non-freeman’s annual tax: but this exemption can only have lasted for
a time, and the great temptation for them to return must have consisted
in the new securities and facilities for trade, which Athens, with her
fortified ports and navy, now afforded. The presence of numerous metics
was profitable to the Athenians, both privately and publicly: much of
the trading, professional, and handicraft business was in their hands:
and the Athenian legislation, while it excluded them from the political
franchise, was in other respects equitable and protective to them.
We are further told that Themistocles prevailed on the Athenians to build
every year twenty new ships of the line--so we may designate the trireme.
Whether this number was always strictly adhered to, it is impossible to
say; but to repair the ships, as well as to keep up their numbers, was
always regarded among the most indispensable obligations of the executive
government. It does not appear that the Spartans offered any opposition
to the fortification of the Piræus, though it was an enterprise greater,
more novel, and more menacing, than that of Athens. But Diodorus tells
us, probably enough, that Themistocles thought it necessary to send an
embassy to Sparta, intimating that his scheme was to provide a safe
harbour for the collective navy of Greece, in the event of future Persian
attack.
Works on so vast a scale must have taken a considerable time, and
absorbed much of the Athenian force; yet they did not prevent Athens
from lending active aid towards the expedition which, in the year after
the battle of Platæa (478 B.C.), set sail for Asia under the Spartan
Pausanias. Twenty ships from the various cities of the Peloponnesus
were under his command: the Athenians alone furnished thirty, under
the orders of Aristides and Cimon: other triremes also came from the
Ionian and insular allies. They first sailed to Cyprus, in which island
they liberated most of the Grecian cities from the Persian government:
next, they turned to the Bosporus of Thrace, and undertook the siege of
Byzantium, which, like Sestus in the Chersonesus, was a post of great
moment, as well as of great strength--occupied by a considerable Persian
force, with several leading Persians and even kinsmen of the monarch. The
place was captured, seemingly after a prolonged siege: it might probably
hold out even longer than Sestus, as being taken less unprepared. The
line of communication between the Euxine Sea and Greece was thus cleared
of obstruction.
THE MISCONDUCT OF PAUSANIAS
[Sidenote: [478 B.C.]]
The capture of Byzantium proved the signal for a capital and unexpected
change in the relations of the various Grecian cities; a change, of which
the proximate cause lay in the misconduct of Pausanias, but towards which
other causes, deep-seated as well as various, also tended. In recounting
the history of Miltiades, we noticed the deplorable liability of the
Grecian leading men to be spoiled by success: this distemper worked with
singular rapidity on Pausanias. As conqueror of Platæa, he had acquired
a renown unparalleled in Grecian experience, together with a prodigious
share of the plunder: the concubines, horses, camels, and gold plate,
which had thus passed into his possession, were well calculated to make
the sobriety and discipline of Spartan life irksome, while his power
also, though great on foreign command, became subordinate to that of the
ephors when he returned home. His newly acquired insolence was manifested
immediately after the battle, in the commemorative tripod dedicated
by his order at Delphi, which proclaimed himself by name and singly,
as commander of the Greeks and destroyer of the Persians: an unseemly
boast, of which the Lacedæmonians themselves were the first to mark their
disapprobation, by causing the inscription to be erased, and the names
of the cities who had taken part in the combat to be all enumerated on
the tripod. Nevertheless, he was still sent on the command against Cyprus
and Byzantium, and it was on the capture of this latter place that his
ambition and discontent first ripened into distinct treason. He entered
into correspondence with Gongylus the Eretrian exile (now a subject of
Persia, and invested with the property and government of a district
in Mysia), to whom he entrusted his new acquisition of Byzantium, and
the care of the valuable prisoners taken in it. These prisoners were
presently suffered to escape, or rather sent away underhand to Xerxes;
together with a letter from the hand of Pausanias, himself, to the
following effect: “Pausanias, the Spartan commander, having taken these
captives, sends them back, in his anxiety to oblige thee. I am minded,
if it so please thee, to marry thy daughter, and to bring under thy
dominion both Sparta and the rest of Greece: with thy aid, I think myself
competent to achieve this. If my proposition be acceptable, send some
confidential person down to the sea-board, through whom we may hereafter
correspond.”
Xerxes, highly pleased with the opening thus held out, immediately sent
down Artabazus (the same who had been second in command in Bœotia)
to supersede Megabates in the satrapy of Dascylium; the new satrap,
furnished with a letter of reply bearing the regal seal, was instructed
to further actively the projects of Pausanias. The letter was to this
purport: “Thus saith King Xerxes to Pausanias. Thy name stands forever
recorded in my house as a well-doer, on account of the men whom thou hast
saved for me beyond sea at Byzantium: and thy propositions now received
are acceptable to me. Relax not either night or day in accomplishing
that which thou promisest, nor let thyself be held back by cost, either
gold or silver, or numbers of men, if thou standest in need of them, but
transact in confidence thy business and mine jointly with Artabazus, the
good man whom I have now sent, in such manner as may be best for both of
us.”
Throughout the whole of this expedition, Pausanias had been insolent and
domineering, degrading the allies at quarters and watering-places in the
most offensive manner as compared with the Spartans, and treating the
whole armament in a manner which Greek warriors could not tolerate, even
in a Spartan Heraclid, and a victorious general. But when he received the
letter from Xerxes, and found himself in immediate communication with
Artabazus, as well as supplied with funds for corruption, his insane
hopes knew no bounds, and he already fancied himself son-in-law of the
Great King, as well as despot of Hellas. Fortunately for Greece, his
treasonable plans were not deliberately laid and veiled until ripe for
execution, but manifested with childish impatience. He clothed himself in
Persian attire--(a proceeding which the Macedonian army, a century and a
half afterwards, could not tolerate, even in Alexander the Great),--he
traversed Thrace with a body of Median and Egyptian guards,--he copied
the Persian chiefs, both in the luxury of his table and in his conduct
towards the free women of Byzantium. Cleonice, a Byzantine maiden of
conspicuous family, having been ravished from her parents by his order,
was brought to his chamber at night: he happened to be asleep, and being
suddenly awakened, knew not at first who was the person approaching his
bed, but seized his sword and slew her. Moreover, his haughty reserve,
with uncontrolled bursts of wrath, rendered him unapproachable; and the
allies at length came to regard him as a despot rather than a general.
The news of such outrageous behaviour, and the manifest evidences of his
alliance with the Persians, were soon transmitted to the Spartans, who
recalled him to answer for his conduct, and seemingly the Spartan vessels
along with him.
In spite of the flagrant conduct of Pausanias, the Lacedæmonians
acquitted him on the allegations of positive and individual wrong;
yet, mistrusting his conduct in reference to collusion with the enemy,
they sent out Dorcis to supersede him as commander. But a revolution,
of immense importance for Greece, had taken place in the minds of the
allies. The headship, or hegemony, was in the hands of Athens, and Dorcis
the Spartan found the allies not disposed to recognise his authority.
Even before the battle of Salamis, the question had been raised, whether
Athens was not entitled to the command at sea, in consequence of the
preponderance of her naval contingent. The repugnance of the allies to
any command except that of Sparta, either on land or water, had induced
the Athenians to waive their pretensions at that critical moment. But
the subsequent victories had materially exalted the latter in the eyes
of Greece: while the armament now serving, differently composed from
that which had fought at Salamis, contained a large proportion of the
newly enfranchised Ionic Greeks, who not only had no preference for
Spartan command, but were attached to the Athenians on every ground--as
well from kindred race, as from the certainty that Athens with her
superior fleet was the only protector upon whom they could rely against
the Persians. Moreover, it happened that the Athenian generals on this
expedition, Aristides and Cimon, were personally just and conciliating,
forming a striking contrast with Pausanias. Hence the Ionic Greeks in
the fleet, when they found that the behaviour of the latter was not only
oppressive towards themselves but also revolting to Grecian sentiment
generally, addressed themselves to the Athenian commanders for protection
and redress, on the plausible ground of kindred race; entreating to
be allowed to serve under Athens as leader instead of Sparta. The
Spartan government about this time recalled Pausanias to undergo an
examination, in consequence of the universal complaints against him
which had reached them. He seems to have left no Spartan authority
behind him,--even the small Spartan squadron accompanied him home: so
that the Athenian generals had the best opportunity for insuring to
themselves and exercising that command which the allies besought them to
undertake. So effectually did they improve the moment, that when Dorcis
arrived to replace Pausanias, they were already in full supremacy; while
Dorcis, having only a small force, and being in no condition to employ
constraint, found himself obliged to return home.
ATHENS TAKES THE LEADERSHIP
[Illustration: TYPE OF GREEK HELMET]
This incident, though not a declaration of war against Sparta, was
the first open renunciation of her authority as presiding state among
the Greeks; the first avowed manifestation of a competitor for that
dignity, with numerous and willing followers; the first separation of
Greece--considered in herself alone and apart from foreign solicitations,
such as the Persian invasion--into two distinct organised camps,
each with collective interests and projects of its own. In spite of
mortified pride, Sparta was constrained, and even in some points of
view not indisposed, to patient acquiescence. The example of their king
Leotychides, too, near about this time, was a second illustration of the
same tendency. At the same time, apparently, that Pausanias embarked
for Asia to carry on the war against the Persians, Leotychides was sent
with an army into Thessaly to put down the Aleuadæ and those Thessalian
parties who had sided with Xerxes and Mardonius. Successful in this
expedition, he suffered himself to be bribed, and was even detected with
a large sum of money actually on his person: in consequence of which the
Lacedæmonians condemned him to banishment, and razed his house to the
ground; he died afterwards in exile at Tegea. Two such instances were
well calculated to make the Lacedæmonians distrust the conduct of their
Heraclid leaders when on foreign service, and this feeling weighed much
in inducing them to abandon the Asiatic headship in favour of Athens. It
appears that their Peloponnesian allies retired from this contest at the
same time as they did, so that the prosecution of the war was thus left
to Athens as chief of the newly emancipated Greeks.
It was from these considerations that the Spartans were induced to submit
to that loss of command which the misconduct of Pausanias had brought
upon them. Their acquiescence facilitated the immense change about to
take place in Grecian politics. According to the tendencies in progress
prior to the Persian invasion, Sparta had become gradually more and
more the president of something like a Panhellenic union, comprising
the greater part of the Grecian states. Such at least was the point
towards which things seemed to be tending; and if many separate states
stood aloof from this union, none of them at least sought to form any
counter-union, if we except the obsolete and impotent pretensions of
Argos.
But the sympathies of the Peloponnesians still clung to Sparta, while
those of the Ionian Greeks had turned to Athens: and thus not only the
short-lived symptoms of an established Panhellenic union, but even all
tendencies towards it from this time disappear. There now stands out a
manifest schism, with two pronounced parties, towards one of which nearly
all the constituent atoms of the Grecian world gravitate: the maritime
states, newly enfranchised from Persia, towards Athens--the land-states,
which had formed most part of the confederate army at Platæa, towards
Sparta. Along with this national schism and called into action by it,
appears the internal political schism in each separate city between
oligarchy and democracy. Of course, the germ of these parties had already
previously existed in the separate states, but the energetic democracy
of Athens, and the pronounced tendency of Sparta to rest upon the native
oligarchies in each separate city as her chief support, now began to
bestow, on the conflict of internal political parties, an Hellenic
importance, and an aggravated bitterness, which had never before belonged
to it.
THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS
[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]
The general conditions of the confederacy of Delos were regulated
in a common synod of the members appointed to meet periodically for
deliberative purposes, in the temple of Apollo and Artemis at Delos--of
old, the venerated spot for the religious festivals of the Ionic cities,
and at the same time a convenient centre for the members. A definite
obligation, either in equipped ships of war or in money, was imposed
upon every separate city; and the Athenians, as leaders, determined in
which form contribution should be made by each: their assessment must
of course have been reviewed by the synod, nor had they at this time
power to enforce any regulation not approved by that body. It had been
the good fortune of Athens to profit by the genius of Themistocles on
two recent critical occasions (the battle of Salamis and the rebuilding
of her walls), where sagacity, craft, and decision were required in
extraordinary measure, and where pecuniary probity was of less necessity:
it was no less her good fortune now--in the delicate business of
assessing a new tax and determining how much each state should bear,
without precedents to guide them, when unimpeachable honesty in the
assessor was the first of all qualities--not to have Themistocles; but to
employ in his stead the well-known, we might almost say the ostentatious
probity of Aristides. This must be accounted good fortune, since at
the moment when Aristides was sent out, the Athenians could not have
anticipated that any such duty would devolve upon him. His assessment not
only found favour at the time of its original proposition, when it must
have been freely canvassed by the assembled allies, but also maintained
its place in general esteem, after Athens had degenerated into an
unpopular empire.
Respecting this first assessment, we scarcely know more than one single
fact--the aggregate in money was four hundred and sixty talents [equal to
about £106,000 or $530,000].
Of the items composing such aggregate, of the individual cities which
paid it, of the distribution of obligations to furnish ships and money,
we are entirely ignorant: the little information which we possess on
these points relates to a period considerably later, shortly before
the Peloponnesian War, under the uncontrolled empire then exercised by
Athens. Thucydides, in his brief sketch, makes us clearly understand
the difference between presiding Athens, with her autonomous and
regularly assembled allies in 476 B.C., and imperial Athens, with her
subject allies in 432 B.C.; the Greek word equivalent to ally left
either of these epithets to be understood, by an ambiguity exceedingly
convenient to the powerful states,--and he indicates the general causes
of the change: but he gives us few particulars as to the modifying
circumstances, and none at all as to the first start. He tells us only
that the Athenians appointed a peculiar board of officers, called
the _hellenotamiæ_, to receive and administer the common fund,--that
Delos was constituted the general treasury, where the money was to be
kept,--and that the payment thus levied was called the _phorus_; a name
which appears then to have been first put into circulation, though
afterwards usual, and to have conveyed at first no degrading import,
though it afterwards became so odious as to be exchanged for a more
innocent synonym.
The public import of the name _hellenotamiæ_, coined for the occasion,
the selection of Delos as a centre, and the provision for regular
meetings of the members, demonstrate the patriotic and fraternal purpose
which the league was destined to serve. In truth, the protection of the
Ægean Sea against foreign maritime force and lawless piracy, as well as
that of the Hellespont and Bosporus against the transit of a Persian
force, was a purpose essentially public, for which all the parties
interested were bound in equity to provide by way of common contribution:
any island or seaport which might refrain from contributing, was a gainer
at the cost of others: and we cannot doubt that the general feeling of
this common danger as well as equitable obligation, at a moment when the
fear of Persia was yet serious, was the real cause which brought together
so many contributing members, and enabled the forward parties to shame
into concurrence such as were more backward.
How it was that the confederacy came to be turned afterwards to the
purposes of Athenian ambition, we shall see at the proper time: but in
its origin it was an equal alliance, in so far as alliance between the
strong and the weak can ever be equal, not an Athenian empire: nay, it
was an alliance in which every individual member was more exposed, more
defenceless, and more essentially benefited in the way of protection,
than Athens.
We have here in truth one of the few moments in Grecian history wherein
a purpose at once common, equal, useful, and innocent, brought together
spontaneously many fragments of this disunited race, and overlaid for
a time that exclusive bent towards petty and isolated autonomy which
ultimately made slaves of them all. It was a proceeding equitable and
prudent, in principle as well as in detail; promising at the time
the most beneficent consequences, not merely protection against the
Persians, but a standing police of the Ægean Sea, regulated by a common
superintending authority. And if such promise was not realised, we shall
find that the inherent defects of the allies, indisposing them to the
hearty appreciation and steady performance of their duties as equal
confederates, are at least as much chargeable with the failure as the
ambition of Athens. We may add that, in selecting Delos as a centre, the
Ionic allies were conciliated by a renovation of the solemnities which
their fathers, in the days of former freedom, had crowded to witness in
that sacred island.
[Sidenote: [477-470 B.C.]]
At the time when this alliance was formed, the Persians still held not
only the important posts of Eion on the Strymon and Doriscus in Thrace,
but also several other posts in that country, which are not specified
to us. We may thus understand why the Greek cities on and near the
Chalcidic peninsula,--Argilus, Stagiras, Acanthus, Scolus, Olynthus,
Spartolus, etc.,--which we know to have joined under the first assessment
of Aristides, were not less anxious to seek protection in the bosom of
the new confederacy, than the Dorian islands of Rhodes and Cos, the Ionic
islands of Samos and Chios, the Æolic Lesbos and Tenedos, or continental
towns such as Miletus and Byzantium: by all of whom adhesion to this
alliance must have been contemplated, in 477 or 476 B.C., as the sole
condition of emancipation from Persia. Nothing more was required for
the success of a foreign enemy against Greece generally than complete
autonomy of every Grecian city, small as well as great--such as the
Persian monarch prescribed and tried to enforce ninety years afterwards,
through the Lacedæmonian Antalcidas, in the pacification which bears
the name of the latter. Some sort of union, organised and obligatory
upon each city, was indispensable to the safety of all. Nor was it by
any means certain, at the time when the confederacy of Delos was first
formed, that, even with that aid, the Asiatic enemy would be effectually
kept out; especially as the Persians were strong, not merely from their
own force, but also from the aid of internal parties in many of the
Grecian states--traitors within, as well as exiles without.
THE TREASON OF PAUSANIAS
Among these, the first in rank as well as the most formidable, was the
Spartan Pausanias. Summoned home from Byzantium to Sparta, in order
that the loud complaints against him might be examined, he had been
acquitted of the charges of wrong and oppression against individuals;
yet the presumptions of _medism_, or treacherous correspondence with
the Persians, appeared so strong that, though not found guilty, he was
still not reappointed to the command. Such treatment seems to have only
emboldened him in the prosecution of his designs against Greece, and he
came out with this view to Byzantium in a trireme belonging to Hermione,
under pretence of aiding as a volunteer without any formal authority in
the war. He there resumed his negotiations with Artabazus: his great
station and celebrity still gave him a strong hold on men’s opinions,
and he appears to have established a sort of mastery in Byzantium, from
whence the Athenians, already recognised heads of the confederacy, were
constrained to expel him by force: and we may be very sure that the
terror excited by his presence as well as by his known designs tended
materially to accelerate the organisation of the confederacy under
Athens. He then retired to Colonæ in the Troad, where he continued for
some time in the farther prosecution of his schemes, trying to form a
Persian party, despatching emissaries to distribute Persian gold among
various cities of Greece, and probably employing the name of Sparta to
impede the formation of the new confederacy: until at length the Spartan
authorities, apprised of his proceedings, sent a herald out to him, with
peremptory orders that he should come home immediately along with the
herald: if he disobeyed, “the Spartans would declare war against him,”
or constitute him a public enemy.
[Sidenote: [_ca._ 470 B.C.]]
As the execution of this threat would have frustrated all the ulterior
schemes of Pausanias, he thought it prudent to obey; the rather, as
he felt entire confidence of escaping all the charges against him at
Sparta by the employment of bribes, the means for which were abundantly
furnished to him through Artabazus. He accordingly returned along with
the herald, and was, in the first moments of indignation, imprisoned by
order of the ephors; who, it seems, were legally competent to imprison
him, even had he been king instead of regent. But he was soon let out,
on his own requisition, and under a private arrangement with friends
and partisans, to take his trial against all accusers. Even to stand
forth as accuser against so powerful a man was a serious peril: to
undertake the proof of specific matter of treason against him was yet
more serious: nor does it appear that any Spartan ventured to do either.
It was known that nothing short of the most manifest and invincible
proof would be held to justify his condemnation, and amidst a long chain
of acts carrying conviction when taken in the aggregate, there was no
single treason sufficiently demonstrable for the purpose. Accordingly,
Pausanias remained not only at large but unaccused, still audaciously
persisting both in his intrigues at home and his correspondence abroad
with Artabazus. He ventured to assail the unshielded side of Sparta by
opening negotiations with the helots, and instigating them to revolt;
promising them both liberation and admission to political privilege; with
a view, first, to destroy the board of ephors, and render himself despot
in his own country, next, to acquire through Persian help the supremacy
of Greece. Some of those helots to whom he addressed himself revealed
the plot to the ephors, who, nevertheless, in spite of such grave
peril, did not choose to take measures against Pausanias upon no better
information--so imposing was still his name and position. But though
some few helots might inform, probably, many others, both gladly heard
the proposition and faithfully kept the secret: we shall find, by what
happened a few years afterwards, that there were a large number of them
who had their spears in readiness for revolt. Suspected as Pausanias was,
yet by the fears of some and the connivance of others, he was allowed to
bring his plans to the very brink of consummation: and his last letters
to Artabazus, intimating that he was ready for action, and bespeaking
immediate performance of the engagements concerted between them, were
actually in the hands of the messenger. Sparta was saved from an outbreak
of the most formidable kind, not by the prudence of her authorities, but
by a mere accident, or rather by the fact that Pausanias was not only a
traitor to his country, but also base and cruel in his private relations.
The messenger to whom these last letters were entrusted was a native of
Argilus in Thrace, a favourite and faithful slave of Pausanias; once
connected with him by that intimate relation which Grecian manners
tolerated, and admitted even to the full confidence of his treasonable
projects. It was by no means the intention of this Argilian to betray
his master; but, on receiving the letter to carry, he recollected, with
some uneasiness, that none of the previous messengers had ever come back.
Accordingly he broke the seal and read it, with the full view of carrying
it forward to its destination, if he found nothing inconsistent with his
own personal safety: he had further taken the precaution to counterfeit
his master’s seal, so that he could easily reclose the letter. On
reading it, he found his suspicions confirmed by an express injunction
that the bearer was to be put to death--a discovery which left him no
alternative except to deliver it to the ephors. But those magistrates,
who had before disbelieved the helot informers, still refused to believe
even the confidential slave with his master’s autograph and seal, and
with the full account besides, which doubtless he would communicate
at the same time, of all that had previously passed in the Persian
correspondence. Partly from the suspicion which, in antiquity, always
attached to the testimony of slaves, except when it was obtained under
the pretended guarantee of torture, partly from the peril of dealing
with so exalted a criminal, the ephors would not be satisfied with any
evidence less than his own speech and their own ears. They directed the
Argilian slave to plant himself as a suppliant in the sacred precinct
of Poseidon, near Cape Tænarus, under the shelter of a double tent, or
hut, behind which two of them concealed themselves. Apprised of this
unexpected mark of alarm, Pausanias hastened to the temple, and demanded
the reason: upon which the slave disclosed his knowledge of the contents
of the letter, and complained bitterly that, after a long and faithful
service,--with a secrecy never once betrayed, throughout this dangerous
correspondence,--he was at length rewarded with nothing better than
the same miserable fate which had befallen the previous messengers.
Pausanias, admitting all these facts, tried to appease the slave’s
disquietude, and gave him a solemn assurance of safety if he would quit
the sanctuary; urging him at the same time to proceed on the journey
forthwith, in order that the schemes in progress might not be retarded.
All this passed within the hearing of the concealed ephors; who at
length, thoroughly satisfied, determined to arrest Pausanias immediately
on his return to Sparta. They met him in the public street, not far from
the temple of Athene Chalciœcus (or of the Brazen House); but as they
came near, either their menacing looks, or a significant nod from one of
them, revealed to this guilty man their purpose; and he fled for refuge
to the temple, which was so near that he reached it before they could
overtake him. He planted himself as a suppliant, far more hopeless than
the Argilian slave whom he had so recently talked over at Tænarus, in a
narrow-roofed chamber belonging to the sacred building; where the ephors,
not warranted in touching him, took off the roof, built up the doors, and
kept watch until he was on the point of death by starvation. According
to a current story, not recognised by Thucydides, yet consistent with
Spartan manners, his own mother was the person who placed the first stone
to build up the door, in deep abhorrence of his treason. His last moments
being carefully observed, he was brought away just in time to expire
without, and thus to avoid the desecration of the temple. The first
impulse of the ephors was to cast his body into the ravine, or hollow,
called the Cæadas, the usual place of punishment for criminals: probably,
his powerful friends averted this disgrace, and he was buried not far
off, until, some time afterwards, under the mandate of the Delphian
oracle, his body was exhumed and transported to the exact spot where
he had died. Nor was the oracle satisfied even with this reinterment:
pronouncing the whole proceeding to be a profanation of the sanctity of
Athene, it enjoined that two bodies should be presented to her as an
atonement for the one carried away. In the very early days of Greece,
or among the Carthaginians, even at this period, such an injunction
would probably have produced the slaughter of two human victims: on the
present occasion, Athene, or Hicesius, the tutelary god of suppliants,
was supposed to be satisfied by two brazen statues; not, however, without
some attempts to make out that the expiation was inadequate.
Thus perished a Greek who reached the pinnacle of renown simply from
the accidents of his lofty descent, and of his being general at Platæa,
where it does not appear that he displayed any superior qualities. His
treasonable projects implicated and brought to disgrace a man far greater
than himself, the Athenian Themistocles.
[Sidenote: [478-470 B.C.]]
The chronology of this important period is not so fully known as to
enable us to make out the full dates of particular events; but we
are obliged--in consequence of the subsequent events connected with
Themistocles, whose flight to Persia is tolerably well marked as to
date--to admit an interval of about nine years between the retirement of
Pausanias from his command at Byzantium, and his death. To suppose so
long an interval engaged in treasonable correspondence, is perplexing;
and we can only explain it to ourselves very imperfectly by considering
that the Spartans were habitually slow in their movements, and that the
suspected regent may perhaps have communicated with partisans, real or
expected, in many parts of Greece. Among those whom he sought to enlist
as accomplices was Themistocles, still in great power--though, as it
would seem, in declining power--at Athens: and the charge of collusion
with the Persians connects itself with the previous movement of political
parties in that city.
[Illustration: THE DYING PAUSANIAS CARRIED FROM THE TEMPLE]
POLITICAL CHANGES AT ATHENS
[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]
The rivalry of Themistocles and Aristides had been greatly appeased
by the invasion of Xerxes, which had imposed upon both the peremptory
necessity of co-operation against a common enemy. Nor was it apparently
resumed, during the times which immediately succeeded the return of
the Athenians to their country: at least we hear of both in effective
service, and in prominent posts. Themistocles stands forward as the
contriver of the city walls and architect of Piræus: Aristides is
commander of the fleet, and first organiser of the confederacy of Delos.
Moreover, we seem to detect a change in the character of the latter: he
had ceased to be the champion of Athenian old-fashioned landed interest,
against Themistocles as the originator of the maritime innovations. Those
innovations had now, since the battle of Salamis, become an established
fact; a fact of overwhelming influence on the destinies and character,
public as well as private, of the Athenians. During the exile at Salamis,
every man, rich or poor, landed proprietor or artisan, had been for the
time a seaman: and the anecdote of Cimon, who dedicated the bridle of
his horse in the Acropolis, as a token that he was about to pass from
the cavalry to service on shipboard, is a type of that change of feeling
which must have been impressed more or less upon every rich man in
Athens. From henceforward the fleet is endeared to every man as the grand
force, offensive and defensive, of the state, in which character all the
political leaders agree in accepting it.
We see by the active political sentiment of the German people, after the
great struggles of 1813 and 1814, how much an energetic and successful
military effort of the people at large, blended with endurance of
serious hardship, tends to stimulate the sense of political dignity and
the demand for developed citizenship: and if this be the tendency even
among a people habitually passive on such subjects, much more was it to
be expected in the Athenian population, who had gone through a previous
training of near thirty years under the democracy of Clisthenes. At
the time when that constitution was first established, it was perhaps
the most democratical in Greece: it had worked extremely well and had
diffused among the people a sentiment favourable to equal citizenship
and unfriendly to avowed privilege: so that the impressions made by the
struggle at Salamis found the popular mind prepared to receive them.
Early after the return to Attica, the Clisthenean constitution was
enlarged as respects eligibility to the magistracy. According to that
constitution, the fourth or last class of the Solonian census, including
the considerable majority of the freemen, were not admissible to offices
of state, though they possessed votes in common with the rest: no person
was eligible to be a magistrate unless he belonged to one of the three
higher classes. This restriction was now annulled, and eligibility
extended to all the citizens. We may appreciate the strength of feeling
with which such reform was demanded, when we find that it was proposed
by Aristides, a man the reverse of what is called a demagogue, and a
strenuous friend of the Clisthenean constitution. No political system
would work after the Persian War, which formally excluded “the maritime
multitude” from holding magistracy. We rather imagine that election
of magistrates was still retained, and not exchanged for drawing lots
until a certain time, though not a long time, afterwards. That which the
public sentiment first demanded was the recognition of the equal and
open principle: after a certain length of experience, it was found that
poor men, though legally qualified to be chosen, were in point of fact
rarely chosen: then came the lot, to give them an equal chance with the
rich. The principle of sortition, or choice by lot, was never applied, as
we have before remarked, to all offices at Athens--never, for example,
to the strategi, or generals, whose functions were more grave and
responsible than those of any other person in the service of the state,
and who always continued to be elected by show of hands.
And it was probably about this period, during the years immediately
succeeding the battle of Salamis,--when the force of old habit
and tradition had been partially enfeebled by so many stirring
novelties,--that the archons were withdrawn altogether from political
and military duties, and confined to civil or judicial administration.
At the battle of Marathon, the polemarch is a military commander,
president of the ten strategi: we know him afterwards only as a civil
magistrate, administering justice to the metics, or non-freemen, while
the strategi perform military duties without him. The special and
important change which characterised the period immediately succeeding
the battle of Salamis, was the more accurate line drawn between the
archons and the strategi; assigning the foreign and military department
entirely to the strategi, and rendering the archons purely civil
magistrates,--administrative as well as judicial. It was by some such
steps that the Athenian administration gradually attained that complete
development which it exhibits in practise during the century from the
Peloponnesian War downward, to which nearly all our positive and direct
information relates.
THE DOWNFALL OF THEMISTOCLES
[Sidenote: [476-472 B.C.]]
With this expansion both of democratical feeling and of military activity
at Athens, Aristides appears to have sympathised; and the popularity
thus insured to him, probably heightened by some regret for his previous
ostracism, was calculated to acquire permanence from his straightforward
and incorruptible character, now brought into strong relief from his
function as assessor to the new Delian confederacy. On the other hand,
the ascendency of Themistocles, though so often exalted by his unrivalled
political genius and daring, as well as by the signal value of his public
recommendations, was as often overthrown by his duplicity of means and
unprincipled thirst for money. New political opponents sprang up against
him, men sympathising with Aristides, and far more violent in their
antipathy than Aristides himself. Of these, the chief were Cimon, son
of Miltiades and Alcmæon; moreover, it seems that the Lacedæmonians,
though full of esteem for Themistocles immediately after the battle of
Salamis, had now become extremely hostile to him--a change which may be
sufficiently explained from his stratagem respecting the fortifications
of Athens, and his subsequent ambitious projects in reference to the
Piræus. The Lacedæmonian influence, then not inconsiderable in Athens,
was employed to second the political combinations against him. He is said
to have given offence by manifestations of personal vanity, by continual
boasting of his great services to the state, and by the erection of a
private chapel, close to his own house, in honour of Artemis Aristobule,
or Artemis of admirable counsel; just as Pausanias had irritated the
Lacedæmonians by inscribing his own single name on the Delphian tripod,
and as the friends of Aristides had displeased the Athenians by endless
encomiums upon his justice.
[Illustration: ARISTIDES AND THE PEASANT]
But the main cause of his discredit was the prostitution of his great
influence for arbitrary and corrupt purposes. In the unsettled condition
of so many different Grecian communities, recently emancipated from
Persia, when there was past misrule to avenge, wrong-doers to be deposed
and perhaps punished, exiles to be restored, and all the disturbance and
suspicions accompanying so great a change of political condition as well
as of foreign policy, the influence of the leading men at Athens must
have been great in determining the treatment of particular individuals.
Themistocles, placed at the head of an Athenian squadron and sailing
among the islands, partly for the purposes of war against Persia, partly
for organising the new confederacy, is affirmed to have accepted bribes
without scruple, for executing sentences just and unjust, restoring some
citizens, expelling others, and even putting some to death. We learn
this from a friend and guest of Themistocles, the poet Timocreon of
Ialysus in Rhodes, who had expected his own restoration from the Athenian
commander, but found that it was thwarted by a bribe of three talents
from his opponents; so that he was still kept in exile on the charge of
_medism_. The assertions of Timocreon, personally incensed on this ground
against Themistocles, are doubtless to be considered as passionate and
exaggerated: nevertheless, they are a valuable memorial of the feelings
of the time, and are far too much in harmony with the general character
of this eminent man to allow of our disbelieving them entirely. Timocreon
is as emphatic in his admiration of Aristides as in his censure of
Themistocles, whom he denounces as “a lying and unjust traitor.”
[Sidenote: [472-471 B.C.]]
Such conduct as that described by this new Archilochus, even making
every allowance for exaggeration, must have caused Themistocles to
be both hated and feared among the insular allies, whose opinion was
now of considerable importance to the Athenians. A similar sentiment
grew up partially against him in Athens itself, and appears to have
been connected with suspicions of treasonable inclinations towards the
Persians. As the Persians could offer the highest bribes, a man open to
corruption might naturally be suspected of inclinations towards their
cause; and if Themistocles had rendered pre-eminent service against
them, so also had Pausanias, whose conduct had undergone so fatal a
change for the worse. It was the treason of Pausanias, suspected and
believed against him by the Athenians even when he was in command at
Byzantium, though not proved against him at Sparta until long afterwards,
which first seems to have raised the presumption of _medism_ against
Themistocles also, when combined with the corrupt proceedings which
stained his public conduct: we must recollect, also, that Themistocles
had given some colour to these presumptions, even by the stratagems in
reference to Xerxes, which wore a double-faced aspect, capable of being
construed either in a Persian or in a Grecian sense. The Lacedæmonians,
hostile to Themistocles since the time when he had outwitted them
respecting the walls of Athens, and fearing him also as a supposed
accomplice of the suspected Pausanias, procured the charge of _medism_
to be preferred against him at Athens; by secret instigations, and, as
it is said, by bribes, to his political opponents. But no satisfactory
proof could be furnished of the accusation, which Themistocles himself
strenuously denied, not without emphatic appeals to his illustrious
services. In spite of violent invectives against him from Alcmæon
and Cimon, tempered, indeed, by a generous moderation on the part of
Aristides, his defence was successful. He carried the people with him and
was acquitted of the charge. Nor was he merely acquitted, but, as might
naturally be expected, a reaction took place in his favour: his splendid
qualities and exploits were brought impressively before the public mind,
and he seemed for the time to acquire greater ascendency than ever.
Such a charge, and such a failure, must have exasperated to the utmost
the animosity between him and his chief opponents,--Aristides, Cimon,
Alcmæon, and others; nor can we wonder that they were anxious to get
rid of him by ostracism. In explaining this peculiar process, we have
already stated that it could never be raised against any one individual
separately and ostensibly, and that it could never be brought into
operation at all, unless its necessity were made clear, not merely
to violent party men, but also to the assembled senate and people,
including, of course, a considerable proportion of the more moderate
citizens. We may well conceive that the conjuncture was deemed by many
dispassionate Athenians well suited for the tutelary intervention of
ostracism, the express benefit of which consisted in its separating
political opponents when the antipathy between them threatened to push
one or the other into extra-constitutional proceedings--especially
when one of those parties was Themistocles, a man alike vast in his
abilities and unscrupulous in his morality. Probably also there were not
a few wished to revenge the previous ostracism of Aristides: and lastly,
the friends of Themistocles himself, elate with his acquittal and his
seemingly augmented popularity, might indulge hopes that the vote of
ostracism would turn out in his favour, and remove one or other of his
chief political opponents. From all these circumstances we learn without
astonishment, that a vote of ostracism was soon after resorted to. It
ended in the temporary banishment of Themistocles.
[Sidenote: [471-466 B.C.]]
He retired into exile, and was residing at Argos, whither he carried
a considerable property, yet occasionally visiting other parts of
the Peloponnesus, when the exposure and death of Pausanias, together
with the discovery of his correspondence, took place at Sparta. Among
this correspondence were found proofs, which Thucydides seems to have
considered as real and sufficient, of the privity of Themistocles.
According to Ephorus and others, he is admitted to have been solicited
by Pausanias, and to have known his plans, but to have kept them secret
while refusing to co-operate in them, but probably after his exile he
took a more decided share in them than before; being well-placed for that
purpose at Argos, a city not only unfriendly to Sparta, but strongly
believed to have been in collusion with Xerxes at his invasion of Greece.
On this occasion the Lacedæmonians sent to Athens, publicly to prefer a
formal charge of treason against him, and to urge the necessity of trying
him as a Panhellenic criminal before the synod of the allies assembled
at Sparta. Whether this latter request would have been granted, or
whether Themistocles would have been tried at Athens, we cannot tell:
for no sooner was he apprised that joint envoys from Sparta and Athens
had been despatched to arrest him, than he fled forthwith from Argos to
Corcyra. The inhabitants of that island, though owing gratitude to him
and favourably disposed, could not venture to protect him against the
two most powerful states in Greece, but sent him to the neighbouring
continent.
Here, however, being still tracked and followed by the envoys, he was
obliged to seek protection from a man whom he had formerly thwarted in a
demand at Athens, and who had become his personal enemy--Admetus, king
of the Molossians. Fortunately for him, at the moment when he arrived,
Admetus was not at home; and Themistocles, becoming a suppliant to
his wife, conciliated her sympathy so entirely, that she placed her
child in his arms, and planted him at the hearth in the full solemnity
of supplication to soften her husband. As soon as Admetus returned,
Themistocles revealed his name, his pursuers, and his danger, entreating
protection as a helpless suppliant in the last extremity. He appealed to
the generosity of the Epirotic prince not to take revenge on a man now
defenceless, for offence given under such very different circumstances;
and for an offence too, after all, not of capital moment, while the
protection now entreated was to the suppliant a matter of life or death.
Admetus raised him up from the hearth with the child in his arms, an
evidence that he accepted the appeal and engaged to protect him; refusing
to give him up to the envoys, and at last only sending him away on the
expression of his own wish to visit the king of Persia. Two Macedonian
guides conducted him across the mountains to Pydna, in the Thermaic
Gulf, where he found a merchant ship about to set sail for the coast
of Asia Minor, and took a passage on board; neither the master nor the
crew knowing his name. An untoward storm drove the vessel to the island
of Naxos, at that moment besieged by an Athenian armament: had he been
forced to land there, he would of course have been recognised and seized,
but his wonted subtlety did not desert him. Having communicated both his
name and the peril which awaited him, he conjured the master of the ship
to assist in saving him, and not to suffer any one of the crew to land;
menacing that if by any accident he were discovered, he would bring the
master to ruin along with himself, by representing him as an accomplice
induced by money to facilitate the escape of Themistocles: on the other
hand, in case of safety, he promised a large reward. Such promises and
threats weighed with the master, who controlled his crew, and forced them
to beat about during a day and a night off the coast, without seeking
to land. After that dangerous interval, the storm abated, and the ship
reached Ephesus in safety.
[Sidenote: [466-460 (?) B.C.]]
Thus did Themistocles, after a series of perils, find himself safe on
the Persian side of the Ægean. At Athens, he was proclaimed a traitor,
and his property confiscated: nevertheless, as it frequently happened
in cases of confiscation, his friends secreted a considerable sum, and
sent it over to him in Asia, together with the money which he had left at
Argos; so that he was thus enabled liberally to reward the ship-captain
who had preserved him. With all this deduction, the property which he
possessed of a character not susceptible of concealment, and which
was therefore actually seized, was found to amount to eighty talents
[about £16,000 or $80,000] according to Theophrastus, to one hundred
talents according to Theopompus. In contrast with this large sum, it
is melancholy to learn that he had begun his political career with a
property not greater than three talents. The poverty of Aristides at the
end of his life presents an impressive contrast to the enrichment of his
rival.
The escape of Themistocles, and his adventures in Persia, appear to have
formed a favourite theme for the fancy and exaggeration of authors a
century afterwards: we have thus many anecdotes which contradict either
directly or by implication the simple narrative of Thucydides. Thus we
are told that at the moment when he was running away from the Greeks, the
Persian king also had proclaimed a reward of two hundred talents for his
head, and that some Greeks on the coast of Asia were watching to take
him for this reward: that he was forced to conceal himself strictly near
the coast, until means were found to send him up to Susa in a closed
litter, under pretence that it was a woman for the king’s harem: that
Mandane, sister of Xerxes, insisted upon having him delivered up to her
as an expiation for the loss of her son at the battle of Salamis: that
he learned Persian so well, and discoursed in it so eloquently, as to
procure for himself an acquittal from the Persian judges, when put upon
his trial through the importunity of Mandane: that the officers of the
king’s household at Susa, and the satraps on his way back, threatened
him with still further perils: that he was admitted to see the king in
person, after having received a lecture from the chamberlain on the
indispensable duty of falling down before him to do homage, etc., with
several other uncertified details, which make us value more highly
the narrative of Thucydides. Indeed, Ephorus, Dinon, Clitarchus, and
Heraclides, from whom these anecdotes appear mostly to be derived, even
affirmed that Themistocles had found Xerxes himself alive and seen him:
whereas, Thucydides and Charon, the two contemporary authors, for the
former is nearly contemporary, asserted that he had found Xerxes recently
dead, and his son Artaxerxes on the throne.
According to Thucydides, the eminent exile does not seem to have
been exposed to the least danger in Persia. He presented himself as
a deserter from Greece, and was accepted as such: moreover,--what is
more strange, though it seems true,--he was received as an actual
benefactor of the Persian king, and a sufferer from the Greeks on
account of such dispositions, in consequence of his communications made
to Xerxes respecting the intended retreat of the Greeks from Salamis,
and respecting the contemplated destruction of the Hellespontine bridge.
He was conducted by some Persians on the coast up to Susa, where he
addressed a letter to the king couched in the following terms, such as
probably no modern European king would tolerate except from a Quaker: “I,
Themistocles, am come to thee, having done to thy house more mischief
than any other Greek, as long as I was compelled in my own defence to
resist the attack of thy father--but having also done him yet greater
good, when I could do so with safety to myself, and when his retreat was
endangered. Reward is yet owing to me for my past service: moreover, I am
now here, chased away by the Greeks, in consequence of my attachment to
thee, but able still to serve thee with great effect. I wish to wait a
year, and then to come before thee in person to explain my views.”
Whether the Persian interpreters, who read this letter to Artaxerxes
Longimanus, exactly rendered its brief and direct expression, we cannot
say. But it made a strong impression upon him, combined with the previous
reputation of the writer, and he willingly granted the prayer for delay:
though we shall not readily believe that he was so transported as to
show his joy by immediate sacrifice to the gods, by an unusual measure
of convivial indulgence, and by crying out thrice in his sleep, “I have
got Themistocles the Athenian,”--as some of Plutarch’s authors informed
him. In the course of the year granted, Themistocles had learned so
much of the Persian language and customs as to be able to communicate
personally with the king, and acquire his confidence: no Greek, says
Thucydides, had ever before attained such a commanding influence and
position at the Persian court. His ingenuity was now displayed in laying
out schemes for the subjugation of Greece to Persia, which were eminently
captivating to the monarch, who rewarded him with a Persian wife and
large presents, sending him down to Magnesia, on the Mæander, not far
from the coast of Ionia. The revenues of the district round that town,
amounting to the large sum of fifty talents [£10,000 or $50,000] yearly,
were assigned to him for bread: those of the neighbouring seaport of
Myus, for articles of condiment to his bread, which was always accounted
the main nourishment: those of Lampsacus on the Hellespont, for wine.
Not knowing the amount of these two latter items, we can not determine
how much revenue Themistocles received altogether: but there can be no
doubt, judging from the revenues of Magnesia alone, that he was a great
pecuniary gainer by his change of country. After having visited various
parts of Asia, he lived for a certain time at Magnesia, in which place
his family joined him from Athens. How long his residence at Magnesia
lasted we do not know, but seemingly long enough to acquire local
estimation and leave mementos behind him. He at length died of sickness,
when sixty-five years old, without having taken any step towards the
accomplishment of those victorious campaigns which he had promised to
Artaxerxes. That sickness was the real cause of his death, we may believe
on the distinct statement of Thucydides; who at the same time notices a
rumour partially current in his own time, of poison voluntarily taken,
from painful consciousness on the part of Themistocles himself that the
promises made could never be performed--a further proof of the general
tendency to surround the last years of this distinguished man with
impressive adventures, and to dignify his last moments with a revived
feeling, not unworthy of his earlier patriotism. The report may possibly
have been designedly circulated by his friends and relatives, in order to
conciliate some tenderness towards his memory (his sons still continued
citizens at Athens, and his daughters were married there). These friends
further stated that they had brought back his bones to Attica, at his
own express command, and buried them privately without the knowledge
of the Athenians; no condemned traitor being permitted to be buried in
Attic soil. If, however, we even suppose that this statement was true,
no one could point out with certainty the spot wherein such interment
had taken place: nor does it seem, when we mark the cautious expressions
of Thucydides, that he himself was satisfied of the fact: moreover, we
may affirm with confidence that the inhabitants of Magnesia, when they
showed the splendid sepulchral monument erected in honour of Themistocles
in their own market-place, were persuaded that his bones were really
enclosed within it.
[Sidenote: [468 B.C.]]
Aristides died about three or four years after the ostracism of
Themistocles; but respecting the place and manner of his death, there
were several contradictions among the authors whom Plutarch had before
him. Some affirmed that he perished on foreign service in the Euxine Sea;
others, that he died at home, amidst the universal esteem and grief of
his fellow-citizens. A third story, confined to the single statement of
Craterus, and strenuously rejected by Plutarch, represents Aristides as
having been falsely accused before the Athenian judicature and condemned
to a fine of fifty minæ [£180, or $900], on the allegation of having
taken bribes during the assessment of the tribute on the allies--which
fine he was unable to pay, and was therefore obliged to retire to Ionia,
where he died. Dismissing this last story, we find nothing certain
about his death except one fact,--but that fact at the same time the
most honourable of all,--that he died very poor. It is even asserted
that he did not leave enough to pay funeral expenses, that a sepulchre
was provided for him at Phalerum at the public cost, besides a handsome
donation to his son Lysimachus, and a dowry to each of his two daughters.
In the two or three ensuing generations, however, his descendants still
continued poor, and even at that remote day, some of them received aid
out of the public purse, from the recollection of their incorruptible
ancestor. Near a century and a half afterwards, a poor man, named
Lysimachus, descendant of the just Aristides, was to be seen at Athens,
near the chapel of Iacchus, carrying a mysterious tablet, and obtaining
his scanty fee of two oboli [3d. or 6 cents] for interpreting the dreams
of the passers-by: Demetrius the Phalerean procured from the people, for
the mother and aunt of this poor man, a small daily allowance.
On all these points the contrast is marked when we compare Aristides with
Themistocles. The latter, having distinguished himself by ostentatious
cost at Olympia, and by a choregic victory at Athens, with little
scruple as to the means of acquisition, ended his life at Magnesia in
dishonourable affluence greater than ever, and left an enriched posterity
both at that place and at Athens. More than five centuries afterwards,
his descendant, the Athenian Themistocles, attended the lectures of the
philosopher Ammonius at Athens, as the comrade and friend of Plutarch
himself.[c]
[Illustration: GRECIAN SEAL RINGS]
[Illustration: GREEK BOAT
(From a wall decoration)]